On the set of PARASOMNIA | ©2026 William Malone

WILLIAM MALONE’S PARASOMNIA, written and directed by Malone, is finally available in its director’s cut on Prime Video.

PARASOMNIA concerns a young woman, Laura Baxter (Cherilyn Wilson), who suffers from the rare title condition. Narcolepsy is a disorder where people fall asleep without warning, but with parasomnia, waking moments are few and far between. Laura’s condition makes her vulnerable to the control of serial killer Byron Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick). Record store employee Danny Sloan (Dylan Purcell) attempts to come to Laura’s rescue.

PARASOMNIA is unquestionably a horror movie. However, this is an instance where its distribution history may be even scarier than the film itself.

Malone relates, “What happened was, the distributors weren’t terribly good. They’ll sell you a big line of how great they’re going to do. But the first thing they did is, when they distributed the film, they sold it to Brazil. They sent the negative of the digital file first, and the next day it was on the Internet for free. So, it pretty much destroyed any ability that we had to get our money back. Financially, it was a disaster because of that. Piracy just destroyed the movie.”

He declines to name those original distributors, adding with a laugh, “You can go look it up.”

However, Malone eventually got the movie back, waiting until all the rights reverted to him. “So, it’s mine now, and we just licensed it through Samuel Goldwyn for streaming, and it’s now available on Prime Video.”

How did PARASOMNIA find its way to Samuel Goldwyn? “They actually contacted me. They had heard about the film and they looked it up. It hadn’t been on streaming for a very long time and they wanted to get it out there, so we put a deal together.”

PARASOMNIA movie poster | courtesy William Malone

After Malone’s earlier experience, “I wasn’t going to do the deal with any strings attached. That was my deal with Samuel Goldwyn. I said, ‘Look, the only reason I’m doing this deal is to get the movie out the way I see the film. Otherwise, we don’t have a deal.’ And they were totally good with that, so it’s in the contract, no changes could be made, they can’t cut it. They can insert commercials in it, if it’s on a commercial network, but that’s about it. No edits to the content.”

The Prime Video version doesn’t mention “that it’s the director’s cut, so people are going to go on there thinking it’s the original version, and so, the next thing I have to do is say, ‘Hey come on, have it say “Director’s Cut,” so people will know.’”

Malone explains that the cut now streaming “is the way I saw the film originally.”

In what amounted to adding insult to injury, the original distributors insisted on changes in the editing of PARASOMNIA. “The distributors wanted to bring some stuff forward, which I thought hurt the movie. To do that, we had to restructure it in such a way that it jumped around timewise, which I’m not a big fan of. It’s been done, certainly, very well by some directors, but I just didn’t feel it was working on this film.”

Therefore, once Malone had the rights again, “I went through and recut the film the way it was originally meant to be, and that’s substantially different, because the film plays now in a much more linear fashion than the original release does.”

Malone cites a key scene. “There was a sequence where little boy Danny meets Laura when they’re both children. That was originally shot in black and white. That got trimmed down to almost nothing in the original version, and now I’ve put that back in, and that plays very early in the film. What’s good is that everything ties together now, when you see where everything came from.”

Having more time also allowed Malone to make visual as well as structural alterations. Originally, “We got pressured into making some changes, and also just time crunches. There were things that I wanted to do that I just wasn’t able to do. I wanted to use miniatures instead of using some CG stuff. So, I was able to shoot miniatures and replace those shots. So, that’s a big part of it.”

Paras C Wilson as Laura Baxter in PARASOMNIA | ©2026 William Malone

The miniatures are based on the work of Polish artist Zdislaw Beksiński (1929-2005). “He passed away just before we made PARASOMNIA. We got the rights to use his artwork. And he apparently wanted to have his artwork in movies, so we were very pleased to be able to strike a deal with the people who owned the rights to his artwork. I think we had six or seven images that we were able to draw from, and recreate some of those for the miniatures, and there’s some other stuff  So check out Zdzislaw Beksiński.”

Much of this is seen in a sequence “somewhere around the middle of the movie. Laura is walking through her dream world and she goes through this long corridor of lost souls, with giant skeletons. That stuff was originally CG. That’s the stuff that I replaced recently. Later in that sequence, towards the end of the sequence, she goes out and she’s in this area where are all these coffins. There are these giant things that are like statues or dead things – I don’t even know what they are,” Malone laughs. “They’re creepy. So, we did those as miniatures and they turned out really well.” Most of the shots with miniatures also have live-action elements. “Cherilyn Wilson has to interact with the stuff.”

Laura encounters many mirrors in her adventures. “Those we kept. Those were all through the entire film, and those are from the original version. Some of those are real, some of them are CG, but that was back in the day.”

Some miniatures, Malone adds, have been retained from the original version, including a quasi-graveyard “that had these weird creatures in it. That was all done by Fantasy II, the guys who did TERMINATOR and so many other movies. I saw one of their movies the other day, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. They did the whole bridge sequence and it was just amazing. They’re just incredible artists. I want to say I couldn’t have made PARASOMNIA without them, because we shot a lot of the stuff at their place Fantasy II, which was in Sunland [in Los Angeles County].”

The Fantasy II facilities were also used as a live-action soundstage where much of the climax of PARASOMNIA takes place, with automaton musicians. “It looks like a theatre. Alison Brie, who was just starting out then, is one of the women with the instruments.”

The re-release allowed Malone to redo PARASOMNIA’s color timing. At the time of the original release, “We weren’t able to color-time it in any kind of serious way, because of the money involved. Back then, when you wanted to get a DaVinci Resolve suite, it was major amounts of money. So, I’ve learned DaVinci myself. That program, by the way, went from being an $800,000 program and to now you can get it for $300. There’s even a free version, which I highly recommend to anybody who wants to get into it, because most of the stuff you really need is in the free version.”

Malone wants to give a shout-out to his PARASOMNIA cast. “There are some great performances in it, and there are some people who have left us, including Phil Newby, who played Phil the record collector, and he was great.

“Also, look for Tom Kuntz’s great automatons, which are miniatures that you’ll see in the film. He did some great work in it. If you’re not familiar with Thomas Kuntz, look him up. He’s amazing.”

What is Malone working on at present?

“I’ve had a lot of interest in some of my unproduced scripts, most notably THE MIRROR, which was a project I had with the late surrealist artist H.R. Giger [whose work includes the creature design for the original ALIEN]. Mega-publisher Mark Miller at Encyclopocalypse Publishing has expressed interest in putting out a novelization. I’m now working with a great young writer, Andy Forman, on the book. We expect to have the novelization out by the end of the year. I’m very excited to finally have this project see the light of day.

“Also, due to the recent wave of interest in my 2002 film FEARDOTCOM, I’m currently working on an expanded documentary on the making of that. The video will include a great deal of never-before-seen material on the film. That should be released on my YouTube channel UNDERTAKING CINEMA before Halloween.”

What would Malone like to tell people who’ve never seen PARASOMNIA about the movie?

“I think it’s sort of a dark fairytale. The full title of the film is PARASOMNIA: DREAMS OF THE SLEEPWALKER. So, that tells you where it’s at. So, don’t expect it to be entirely realistic, because that’s not really what the film is about. Like I say, it’s a dark fairytale. There’s some gory stuff in it, which is mostly in the second half.”

 And what would Malone like to say to people who have seen the previous cut and have memories of it?

“I think the film plays really well now. I would like to say that I think it’s quite a different movie, and hopefully they’ll give it a look. I’m very proud of it. I hope they like it.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview: Writer – producer – director William Malone about the director’s cut of PARASOMNIA on Prime Video

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